The Weightier Matter of Justice
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Toward the end of His ministry, Jesus unleashed a flurry of rhetorical “woes” on the scribes and Pharisees, the Jewish leaders who badgered, berated and plotted against the Messiah for three years. One of His rebukes called them out for superficial obedience.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus said. “For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!” (Matt. 23:23–24)
That passage came to mind recently for a couple of reasons as I pondered current events. I thought first about justice because it is at the core of so much news right now.
We want justice for George Floyd, a victim of police brutality. We want it for the black Americans he has come to represent. We want it for the business owners whose stores were looted and destroyed. We want it for the police officers who were injured or killed during riots. We want it for peaceful protesters who were wrongly mistreated by the police.
Ironically, a desire for justice is the one force that unites us, yet we have turned it into a point of contention. Some Americans emphasize racial justice, including the abstract goal of changing hearts; others stress law and order, a concrete form of justice focused on changing behavior or punishing those who don’t change.
As I considered that contrast, my mind turned to another word Jesus used — weightier. He told the scribes and Pharisees they were right to tithe but scolded them for emphasizing that lawful practice over the more substantive matters of justice, mercy and faith.
The current situation in America isn’t exactly parallel because we’re all focused on the weighty matter of justice. But we are divided over which form of justice matters most.
David French described the conflict well in a recent essay for The Dispatch. “We divided on what we said quietly and what we said loudly,” he wrote. “Think of our arguments as lowercase or uppercase. On the left: Of course rioting is wrong, BUT POLICE BRUTALITY IS THE CRISIS. On the right: Of course Floyd’s death was wrong, BUT RIOTING IS TYRANNY.”
So how do we reconcile this clash of ideals over a righteous principle? I think the key is to agree on the weightiest aspect of justice for any given point in time. Seek justice in everything, but focus our intellectual and emotional energy on righting the greatest wrongs — just like prosecutors and police do when deciding what arrests to make or cases to pursue.
By any objective analysis, the greatest wrong in American history is the mistreatment of blacks. It started in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves at Point Comfort, Virginia, and is still evident four centuries later, most notably now in the unequal application of law enforcement.
Blacks have been treated like property and subjected to black codes, Jim Crow laws, lynching and other heinous forms of racism for centuries. They are still maligned by white supremacists. Their gains in American society have come at great cost, even when protesting peacefully.
And that’s just a high-level overview of noteworthy developments in black history. The real story, the one blacks are telling now on social media, doesn’t make the news. It’s a story of petty calls to police (dubbed “white caller crime”), lost job opportunities, suspicious looks, racist comments and questions, and a host of other daily offenses.
Legal justice for Derek Chauvin and the other three officers accused of killing Floyd will come, but the protests seem to be about a deeper justice — the kind Jesus had in mind. He didn’t reproach the scribes and Pharisees for failing to seek or impose criminal or civil penalties; he called them out for failing to treat their fellowmen fairly.
When it comes to race in America, we can rest on the laurels of previous generations by saying the country abolished slavery, criminalized lynching, desegregated schools, strengthened voting rights for blacks, marginalized white supremacists, purged the n-word from acceptable discourse, and elected a black president (twice). Or we can listen to what our black fellowmen are saying now and figure out how we can give them even more justice, as individuals and as a nation.
Yes, all lives matter. Small businessmen whose shops have been destroyed matter. Police officers who put their lives at risk matter. We can’t leave their justice undone. But at this moment in American history, the weightier matter is demonstrating that black lives matter, too.
